9/11/2008 @ 12:00AM

'Severe Clear' On 9/11

Severe clear. This is an aviation term used by pilots to describe unlimited visibility conditions. Typically, severe clear conditions occur after a storm or heavy weather, the kind of weather New York City and the Eastern seaboard experienced on Sept. 10, 2001. For many of us, the crisp blue sky after a thunderstorm always harkens us back to that hard September day.

Out of the blue, which is to say, without warning or expectation, the world we knew changed forever. After the sky turned dark and thick, we had, for a while, the kind of moral clarity we needed to take decisive action, even as our hearts were broken.

Today, seven years after 2,974 of our fellow human beings were taken from us in an act of war, it is remarkable how much we have accomplished and how easily we have slipped back into old habits.

The shock of the attacks, the magnitude of the destruction which unfolded right before our eyes, cleared away the ordinary impediments to getting things done. The country instantly came together to cope with the crisis of rescue and recovery, joining together to dig out the survivors, find the victims and provide aid and comfort to their families. More than 20,000 body parts were recovered at Ground Zero; 1.8 million tons of steel and rubble were cleared in nine months–and under budget.

At the Pentagon, firefighters battled a ferocious fire that raged all day. Construction trade workers threw out union rules and worked around the clock to ensure that the symbol of American military might rose again. The job to rebuild 1 million square feet of damaged office space in five connected buildings was estimated to take four years but was completed by the first anniversary of the attacks.

The humanitarian and rebuilding efforts weren’t the only considerations that prompted a united front. The World Trade Center towers were the iconic symbols of U.S. economic power. It was essential that the stock market not fail, that the economy hold, that the sectors hurt by the attacks come back. It was understood that economic recovery was tied to national security, but it was also about fellow feeling and national pride.

After 9/11, our political leaders didn’t hold interminable rounds of hearings covering the same ground they’d debated for years yet changing nothing. The Senate and House of Representatives joined together and passed laws aimed at closing the holes in our homeland security that had allowed 19 terrorists to breech four cockpit doors.

Congress passed the Patriot Act 45 days after the attacks and enacted the law which allowed airline pilots to be armed, resulting in the third-largest federal law enforcement body in the nation. The airlines, which had sent lobbyists to Washington to oppose fortifying cockpit doors prior to 9/11, finally secured them rather than risk the wrath of flight crews and the flying public.

We learned that in 2000, sensitive to accusations about “domestic spying,” the National Security Agency withdrew intercepts of phone calls made from the U.S. to a known Bin Laden switchboard at a house in Yemen. The calls had been placed by Khalid al-Midhar in San Diego, where he and Nawaf al-Hamzi, two of the hijackers on American Airlines flight 77, were living. An NBC news report called the failure to intercept these calls “one of the missed opportunities that could have saved 3,000 lives.”

One month after 9/11, the NSA’s terrorist surveillance program, which allowed foreign-to-domestic communications monitoring, or listening to foreign-to-foreign calls that were routed through U.S. telecoms, was given executive branch approval. Rep. Jane Harmon, then the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee who was one of the few members of Congress briefed on the program at the time, called it “essential to U.S. national security.”

The U.S. State Department eliminated the Visa Express program, which had allowed travel agencies in Saudi Arabia, rather than the U.S. embassy, to conduct interviews of visa applicants and process them. Three of the 9/11 hijackers, whose applications were riddled with red flags, got their visas that way. The Treasury Department instituted vigorous and successful programs to dry up terrorist financing and identify money laundering operations that function through Muslim charities.

Our magnificent men and women in the military have done the heaviest lifting of all. We were no longer going to play defense. They have done everything that their commanders in the field have asked them to do, killing or neutralizing thousands of al-Qaida and Taliban fighters, while winning hearts and minds by building infrastructure and schools, giving the people of Afghanistan and, later, Iraq a fair opportunity at self rule.

The fact that these conflicts are continuing, that they are complicated and difficult on both fronts, should not detract from our military’s enormous success in pushing back al-Qaida and the Taliban. By comparison, in the eight years that passed between the first attack on the World Trade Center and the attacks on 9/11, the Justice Department prosecuted 29 terrorists. That was our answer to Osama Bin Laden’s repeated declarations of war.

Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy, who led the prosecution of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and a dozen others in his terrorist organization, put it in perspective this way: “The United States’ forces have often killed and captured in a single day of combat more jihadists than were prosecuted throughout the 1990s.”

On this seventh anniversary, we can, and should, stand back and ask, “Have we taken the right steps? Can we do better? How much of our resources should we shift to new areas of vulnerability, to new tactics and emerging threats?”

With the exception of our ongoing military mission, all of the above-mentioned national security initiatives and changes in the law were accomplished or initiated within one year of the attacks, well before the 9/11 Commission had convened or issued a single report.

By the time the commission made its recommendations in 2004, many of the most important changes in our national security posture had already been made. The change from a passive to an aggressive national defense could only have taken place because the public would accept no less.

We must also ask whether we are losing our resolve and becoming complacent. Ironically, the enormity of what we have achieved has given the public so great a sense of security that even mentioning terrorism in the context of national security is met with charges of “fear mongering.” Some have even questioned whether the threat of terrorism has been grossly overstated, or is a “macho fantasy.”

To this, one need only point to the Islamist attacks that continue to take place in every corner of the globe, as well as Bin Laden’s stated ambition to take over Somalia and the strategically important Horn of Africa, where hunger, poverty, tribal violence and a “youth bulge” make for a witch’s brew of danger.

Perhaps the most important observation made by the 9/11 Commission is as relevant today as it was four years ago. It described the threat that killed our fellow citizens as a “gathering storm” which went unrecognized and unchecked for too many years and characterized the inability to predict the attack itself as a “failure of imagination.” Looking forward, the Commission offered this pointed warning, “Once the danger has fully materialized, evident to all, mobilizing action is easier–but it then may be too late.”

It is not enough to spend this day in quiet contemplation of those we loved and lost. We must also remember the “severe clear” conditions that came after the tumultuous storm that hit us so hard on that

terrible day and that allowed us to restore our country and each other.

The passengers and crew of United Airlines flight 93 are the enduring example for us all. In the blink of an eye, 40 unarmed citizens assessed their situation, took a vote and decided to take back the plane

or die trying. Their decisive act of courage inspired an entire nation to follow their lead and “do something.”

The greatest tribute we can offer the victims of Sept. 11, in addition to living our lives with joy and meaning, is to confront reality without flinching. They showed us the way.

Debra Burlingame is the sister of Capt. Charles F. “Chic” Burlingame, III, pilot of American Airlines flight 77, which was hijacked and crashed at the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. She is a member of The Committee on the Present Danger, a non-partisan organization devoted to fighting terrorism, and a director of the National Sept. 11 Memorial Foundation.